Homer, Alaska

Latitude 59.6593°N Longitude 151.44217°W

Monday, September 2, 2002

Diary:

More rain all day today. No surprises there.

Keiko did laundry and I went to an internet cafe, where disaster
struck. Today was yet another one of those black days for technology.
After successfully downloading and installing lots of software onto our
new Vaio laptop computer, including the Palm Pilot Desktop software, I was
finally ready to hotsync my Palm Pilot to the Vaio. This would serve two
purposes. Most importantly, it would back up all the data in my Palm,
which hadn't been done since starting the trip. Secondly, it would
transfer all the Travelog notes I'd been taking on the Palm to the Vaio,
and from there, it could be easily posted to our Travelog website.

The cause is still unknown, but when I connected the Palm to the Vaio
to do the sync, the screen of the Palm flashed some hieroglyphics in a
very worrying way and then went completely blank. Fearing that the cable
was causing some kind of an electrical short circuit I immediately
disconnected it, but this caused the Palm to go into an infinte reboot
loop. I'll spare the non-technical readers the lengthy and gory details of
all my recovery attempts at this point, but ultimately the only way out of
the loop was to erase all the data in the Palm. This was a pretty
"disappointing" outcome (believe me, that's a summary of my feelings at
that point - just ask Keiko!). A lot of data was permanently lost that was
not backed up anywhere - notes, people's contact information we had met so
far on the trip, etc. Not to mention all the other essential information I
keep in there.

Much, much later on that day I had recovered enough to be safely
approachable by other humans. Keiko tried to take my mind off things by
taking me to the local movie theatre to watch "XXX" with Vin Diesel and
Asia Argento, which we both enjoyed immensely.